Bottle It Up
by lella7
Summary: Sirius returns to Number 12 Grimmauld Place many years after having escaped, and reflects on why he really left. Written for LynxMalfoy's Random PromptCompetition on the HPFC forum. Oneshot. Reviews are love :D


Bottle It Up

Sirius Black liked to think of himself as a rebel. He rebelled against his family from an early age, always imitating the Muggles he saw whizzing through the streets of London on motorbikes, instead of Quidditch players like his younger brother. He wondered whether his love of motorbikes had stemmed purely from a desire to annoy his parents. That was all he had wanted to do; just to annoy them.

He had spent his entire childhood aiming to do just that. He had played childish tricks on his brother, been noisy and rude and done his utmost to embarrass his proud, haughty parents, revelling in ruffling their stiff composure. When asked about this in later life, however, he had proudly stated that there was a deeper reason. He had detested everything his parents stood for and he had sought to make his disgust at their prejudice obvious. But that was a lie. Like most young children, he had just wanted to test how far he could push them.

Things had changed when he met James. He suddenly began to see that his parents really were wrong. Being a Black only made you special in a very small circle of people. In the real world it was friendship, loyalty and courage that made you both stand out and fit in. He had tried so hard to show all three. Those who did not know Sirius well would have thought him too laidback and carefree to care about fitting in, but from the moment he was sorted into Gryffindor, everything he did was in an attempt to achieve just that. Dumbledore had told them all, just before his sorting, that their house would become their family, and Sirius had, on that day stopped belonging to the Blacks, wanting to belong only to Gryffindor.

His resistance towards his family had become much stronger; he wore his Gryffindor scarf all year round, to the point where his mother almost strangled him attempting to curse it off his neck, and never told his parents where he was, though he had no problems saying who he was with and watching his parents' eyes narrow in disgust. He still had never pushed them too far. He knew when to stop and act like a respectable pureblood for a little while, just so that he was never quite alienated from his family. And he hated himself for it, imagining what James would say if he could see his friend acting like such a coward. But, he had thought, perhaps he was a coward, sheltering under the protection at his lineage and bottling up the anger that he felt at his hypocrisy.

The bottled up anger had come spilling out eventually, and filled with rage after a long-forgotten argument, he had left and he had never come back. It was the final straw for both himself and his mother. She would no longer allow him to taint the family name and he, having tasted freedom and the respect it brought him amongst his friends, was too stubborn to ever go back. Ties had been severed, and that was the end of it.

And yet here he was, back in his childhood home, a house of prejudice and injustice becoming the centre of the battle against the twisted values for which it had once stood. Once he had recovered from the shock of hearing his mother's voice shrieking as they entered, for the first time in almost twenty years, he began to feel oddly reminiscent. The other order members had seemed to understand, fighting their way through cobwebs and filth to the basement kitchen, and leaving him to explore the upper floors alone. Sirius, however, didn't really understand himself. He wasn't really one for reflecting, at least not about his childhood. Whenever thoughts of it crept into his mind, he immediately busied himself so as to avoid the bitterness they built up inside him. He had managed to avoid properly thinking about his family for five whole years after escaping their clutches, and in Azkaban he had thought of them far too much and had no desire to repeat the experience. He didn't think it would be possible, though, to run from his past now he was forced to live in this awful place, once again imprisoned by his own memories.

It was as dark and gloomy as the place had always been, but now covered in a thick layer of grime it did not even feel inhabitable. Sirius struggled to even make it up the stairs to the top floor, so often did he find himself accosted by cobwebs and spiders, and even the occasional malicious-looking doxy. There must have been a nest of them around somewhere.

He walked automatically towards his bedroom door, as if he had been called along the familiar route. The door was not locked and opened at his light touch. Sirius was not sure what he had been expecting, but it was not the familiar sight laid out in front of him. Some of his things had been removed and he wouldn't have been surprised if his mother had made a bonfire of them, but an awful lot remained. The pictures and banners on the walls, though coated with a thin layer of dust, were just the same as they had been and all the slightly spell-damaged furniture remained and Sirius recognised each scratch and burn that he had caused through some mishap or prank.

He ran his fingers over the soft, scarlet drapes around his bed, and they creased willingly at his touch though he could feel the hint of magical energy in them which told him that the charms he had cast, in order to prevent his mother tearing them down, remained strong. He had never paid a great deal of attention to his Charms classes, but he had made learning how to cast a perfect permanent sticking charm a priority from the day he had first attempted to redecorate his bedroom.

He had been twelve and from what he remembered, there had been a lot more pictures of motorbikes soaring through flaming hoops and cascading waterfalls and far fewer of that pretty Muggle model he'd grown quite obsessed with about three years later. In a fit of childish rebellion, he had spellotaped Muggle photographs to his walls until they were plastered in the things. For a few hours he had got away with it until he came up to his room that evening to find his mother scraping at the walls like a woman possessed, tearing at his collage, the floor littered with torn paper and scrunched up balls of spellotape.

But he had found new pictures, and new ways of affixing them, so they had survived until this day. He was sure his mother had been very frustrated upon finding she could not remove them from the walls of her precious ancestral home. That was perhaps the main reason he had put them up.

Maybe things hadn't changed when he got to Hogwarts. Perhaps he had just continued along the same vein, annoying his family but never quite pushing them too far and bottling his anger before he could isolate himself completely. Maybe when he ran away, it wasn't for those moral reasons Sirius prized himself upon, but purely a result of that bottled anger spilling out. The thought chilled him. Perhaps he was not as much of a rebel as he had thought.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, a photograph seemed to draw him close. It was one of the few wizarding photographs on the wall; four boys laughing over some forgotten joke. And Sirius knew, no matter what his reasoning, he had done the right thing in leaving his family. For once he ignored his anger at the watery-eyed boy on the far right and even his friendship towards Remus on the far left, focussing only on the two figures in the centre; himself and James, so young in the picture that he barely even saw James. He saw Harry. They say that friends are the family you choose, and he knew that they were his true family, and he would do anything to keep it that way.


End file.
